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of political convictions and commitments (if one is a liberal) and one's work as a political theorist? I believe that question to be of fundamental importance to political thought as a discipline. At its heart, it is about where we draw the limits on our theoretical work. It is a question that we will have sufficient opportunity to reflect on throughout this book, and one that I return to again, in detail, in the concluding chapter. There are other questions raised by our referring to Shklar as a liberal thinker. For we must first ask, what is
Throughout this book we have seen Shklar adopting a distinctive approach to her work as a political theorist. To start with, there are very sound reasons to place her work in the same camp as so-called political non-moralists. In putting cruelty first among the vices, she sees herself as offering a version of liberalism understood primarily as a protection against the worst abuses of power (Sagar 2016 , p. 370). Hers is also a sceptical form of political theory, and so she endeavours to engage in political thought without having to rely on a
We have seen how Shklar is, in various ways, a widely acknowledged and significant influence on the approach to political thinking that we have called political non-moralism. Like many political non-moralists, hers is a sceptical approach that focuses on protection against the greatest political evil, namely cruelty, and arguably tyranny is its apotheosis. Nonetheless, scepticism is not the only characteristic of her mature political thought, and it may not even be the most important when it comes to the question of how she understands
response to Rawls's political thought. Realists say that we need to start from political practice rather than from abstract theoretical ideals. This is the case, as it is practice rather than philosophy that determines when utopian projects retain or loose legitimacy: There will have been no great change in the argumentative character of the legitimation or the criticisms of it. The change is in the historical setting in terms of which one or the other makes sense
What does the work of Judith Shklar reveal to us about the proper role and limits of political theory? In particular, what are the implications of her arguments both for the way in which we should think of freedom and for the approach we should take to the resolution of moral conflicts? There is growing interest in Shklar’s arguments, in particular the so-called liberalism of fear, characteristic of her mature work. She has become an important influence for those taking a sceptical approach to political thought and also for those concerned first and foremost with the avoidance of great evils. However, this book shows that the most important factor shaping her mature work is not her scepticism but, rather, a value monist approach to both moral conflict and freedom, and that this represents a radical departure from the value pluralism (and scepticism) of her early work. This book also advances a clear line of argument in defence of value pluralism in political theory, one that builds on but moves beyond Shklar’s own early work.
1964a; 1964b; 1964c; 1966; 1967; 1998 [1972] ). The second is that the problems this creates, both epistemological and normative in nature, illustrate the benefits of a value pluralist approach to political thought more generally and to our understanding of freedom more specifically, an approach that owes a great deal to the work of Isaiah Berlin (see Berlin, 2004 [1958] ; Williams, 1965 ; Fives 2017 ). As we shall see below in much greater detail, my interpretation of Shklar's work is a novel and even a controversial one. Others draw attention
Justice ( 1971 ), a book that sought to breathe ‘new life into normative approaches to politics, and re-founding political philosophy as a distinctive normative enterprise linked to – but no longer entirely subordinated to – normative ethics’ (Kelly, 2018 : 2). Others who characterized such an approach include Jürgen Habermas, as well as a large number of writers who represent Marxist political thought. Against this trend of the ‘ethicization of political thought … Foucault pushes in the opposite direction, for a political thought that stands against normativity
Conflict: Past and Present ( TiC ), still clocks in at over 600 pages (longer than his supervisor’s Habilitation , The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ). 12 TiC is a masterpiece that flagrantly violates the informal division of labour between political theory and the history of political thought that has become essential to the self-conception of political philosophy as an essentially un- or anti-historical pursuit. 13 As a testament to Forst’s intellectual historical bona fides , the English edition was published in the Cambridge Ideas in
Shklar's liberalism of fear is, as we have seen, an approach to political thought that ranks the vices in a particular way. She is, of course, in various ways a sceptic as well. Nonetheless, my thesis here is that her putting cruelty first among the vices in this way is evidence of a not insignificant degree of epistemological ambition. Although she is offering a sceptical alternative to political moralism, in one important respect Shklar's work is not all that different from that of its most representative figures, including Rawls and Mill
unopposed. Invoking a perhaps simplistic dichotomy à la Isaiah Berlin (1953; 1969), we may draw a distinction between two fundamental political traditions in Western political thought; the absolutists, who, for fear of political chaos, believe that all power should be united in one individual or group of individuals, and the constitutionalists, who believe that all power should be checked, lest the rulers arrogate to themselves powers to which they are not entitled. Among the former we may cite Plato, Hobbes, Jean Bodin, Robert Filmer, Karl Marx, Carl Schmidt and Lenin